Premature birth places infants at increased risk for learning disabilities, delayed development of speech, language and motor skills, and mortality. The premature infant often has difficulties with respiration and feeding and therefore may remain in the hospital for prolonged periods of time. The non-nutritive suck (NNS) is a motor behavior which can be observed and used to make inference about brain development and organization in this young population.
Oral stimulation therapy is a common practice, in which feeding therapists manually apply a stimulation using their fingertip. Manually applying stimulation, however, has a number of drawbacks. One such drawback includes the variance and limitation in the amount of motion (amplitude) and rhythm (frequency) from therapist to therapist, or even by the same individual. As a result, extensive and costly training and experience are required for a therapist to be proficient at providing manual stimulation and assessment.
In addition, manual stimulation is given essentially blind, as patients can respond by producing a variety of undesirable motor actions, including but not limited to clenching the jaws, tongue compression, tongue thrusting, or other reactions that may be confused with desirable NNS events. As such, it can be difficult to determine if the manual stimulation is beneficial to the patient.
Therefore, a need exists for an automated system and method to assess a patient's natural NNS pattern and to provide precise and beneficial tactile stimulus to correct and organize the patients NNS pattern.